Carousela restaurant owner: “We need more awareness of the issue. It’s not about getting
rid of the rabbinate, but reorganizing the institution and the way it works.
The politicians need to take this to the next level. The law needs to be
changed.”

"I don't
intend to eat in every place that advertises itself as kosher, but I think it
is the right of every place to do so,"Rabbi Aaron Leibowitzsaid in
response to the war the Jerusalem Rabbinate has been waging against the
capital's restaurants.

One common complaint, [ITIM director
Rabbi Shaul] Farber said, comes from women seeking to open a file for marriage
registration, who are refused by the registrar on the grounds that the woman
was not dressed modestly enough.

Until now, it has
been impossible to bring a formal complaint against such council employees.

“We’d like to see
clerks, or rabbis for that matter, who don’t treat people with basic respect,
removed from office,” Farber said.

The
Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee tried to advance a bill on
Tuesday to extend the terms of Israel's chief rabbis by three months, even
though the panel's legal adviser said the vote was illegal. But the attempt by
the committee's chairman, MK David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu) failed and a revote
will be necessary.

The Knesset, in a recess session on
Monday, approved amendments to a new law that will enable just one rabbinical
judge, or dayan, to hear and rule on cases in the Supreme Rabbinical Court.

Until now, a panel of
at least three dayanim was needed to hear a case. The government advanced the
legislation because of a severe backlog of cases, as well as a freeze in
permanent appointments to the court, known as the Beit Din Hagadol.

The Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) has chosen a Modern
Orthodox, Zionist rabbi – Moshe Klein – to be the rabbi of its medical
institutions, succeeding its longtime rabbi, Yaacov Rakovski, who died last
January.

The announcement last week thus put to an end speculation and
concern – which was even expressed in a large advertisement inThe Jerusalem Post that political and other pressures
would lead to the appointment of an ultra- Orthodox rabbi, without the Zionist
credentials of the Women’s Zionist Organization of America that owns the
medical centers.

It
shows that of the ultra-Orthodox schools whose students were tested, 44% ranked
in the bottom decile, meaning the bottom 10%. Another 14% scored in the second
decile (between the 10th and 20th percentiles).

In
the Haredi schools, the test was only administered at 20% of the schools, and
only to pupils in the 5th grade. Moreover, they were only tested for Hebrew and
math.

Under
the new law, Israel’s daylight saving time will run an average of 193 days a
year, compared to 182 under the former law. It should be noted that next Yom
Kippur falls on September 13, 2013, meaning that the holy day will be included
in next year’s daylight saving time.

MK Ronit
Tirosh, who initiated the bill together with MK
Nitzan Horowitz, said: "The bill is better that
the current state but it's not enough. Daylight Savings Time should be extended
further. There's no reason for Israelis not to enjoy another hour of daylight."

Amsellem
holds up a mirror to Shas' leaders in which they appear to be exploiting other
people's misery. They are interested in leaving the ultra-Orthodox population
ignorant, poor and dependent on them.

Rabbi Shai
Piron, who occupies the second slot on the Yesh Atid party's Knesset list,
said, Thursday evening, that he conditioned his joining the party, among other
things, on his not being the only religious person on the ballot.

Interviewed
by Kol Yisrael government radio, he said he demanded that Dr. Aliza
Lavie be placed in one of the ten top places. Dr. Lavie is a senior lecturer in
the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University.

A letter leaked to the press over the weekend shed new light
on the seriousness with which the mainstream haredi leadership is taking the
political discontent felt by certain factions in the ultra- Orthodox community.

Referring to the
party's MKs, Yosef said that Shas' parliamentary and ministerial
representatives “haven't yet finished the job. In the next Knesset they will
continue, God willing, doing their best to make the Torah grow and to glorify
it, to reinforce Jewish tradition and prevent assimilation.

As a
summary of the book’s content [Zera Yisrael], I underscored four important
points regarding conversion as agreed upon by a majority of halakhic
authorities:

1)
The convert must accept the responsibility of mitzvoth.

2)
It must be clear that the potential convert’s true intention is to be a Jew
with belief in the unity of God, the prohibition of idolatry, a rejection and
distancing from his or her previous faith, and accepting some of the lighter
and stricter mitzvoth that the court presents.

3)
It is not necessary to know at the time of the conversion that a potential
convert plans to observe everything, nor does the convert need to explicitly
commit to complete observance.

4)
If it is evident that that the potential convert has no intention to observe
mitzvoth (for example, if one lives on a secular kibbutz where one will
continue to desecrate the Shabbat, eat non-Kosher food, eat hametz on Pessah,
and live exactly as one did prior to the conversion), then that person cannot
be converted.

The
writer is former president of the International Rabbinical Assembly

Those who
know Jewish law know that the requirements for conversion are much less
stringent than those demanded by official rabbinical courts in Israel and
elsewhere.

When a court refuses to convert someone because she could not recite
the Ashrei prayer by heart or would not agree to refrain from swimming
in a pool alongside men, we are dealing with “fences of Primal Adam” and not
with Jewish law.

Ronen Birvdaker, a Jewish Indian from
Mumbai, was so moved by the 2008 terrorist attack in his home city that he
decided to immigrate to Israel last year. On Wednesday, he completed his
training to become a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade.

Birvdaker, 25, said
that after the November 2008 attack — which killed 166 people, including a
Chabad emissary and his wife — he felt that as a Jew there was no place for him
to live other than in Israel.

The impact
of Taglit-Birthright Israel on its alumni six to eleven years after their trip
to Israel is examined in this study. The data are derived from the third year
of a longitudinal study of Jewish young adults.

The Jewish People
today is mostly divided into two subpopulations: the Jews of Israel (~43%) and
those of North America (~40%).

They differ not just
in the content of Jewish identity but in its very structure. Jewish identity in
the Diaspora consists of voluntary religious and ethnic identification and
solidarity.

Alternatively, in
Israel, while Jewish identity is of core importance, it is largely automatic.
Its major implications have to do with language, territory, citizenship, and
political membership. Reigning patterns of Jewish identity are now challenged
by dissenting conceptions and emerging new forms.

In order to make
effective policy, decision makers must deepen their understanding of Jewish
identity in each of the two main centers and confront the challenge of forming
a common language and network to bridge these two disparate conceptions of
Jewish identity.

For most
Americans living in Israel, the issue of religion and state is irrelevant.
True, many American-born Israelis are at the forefront of the struggle for
religious pluralism and for state recognition of Reform and Conservative
movements, but many others are, quite simply, Orthodox: They don’t believe in
separation of religion and state and are quite happy, naturally, to live in a
country in which the Orthodox rule.

'You want the free spirit
all the time', filmmaker Rama Burshetein tells Haaretz. 'At 25, my free spirit
involved eating shrimp. Having sex. Now I know that the only free spirit is the
connection with Hashem.’

"There
is no guiding vision behind what the secular parties want, just a general sense
that the government should ensure that no one suffers, that tycoons should be
put into place and that more government is better. Despite the events of the
last four years, Europe is their model.

The
Haredim do have a vision, which is what makes them both so powerful and
dangerous: it's that they not suffer economically and the rest of us have to
muddle through. Eastern Europe of a century or more ago is their model."

But aside from
being the certifying body, MDA is also a supplier - apparently the country's
largest - of these same medical security services. Recently, the Ihud Hatzala
rescue service has begun to compete for this business, and MDA apparently finds
itself facing an integral conflict of interest.